The Source of Facilitation in the Recall of Context Words that Accompany Associatively Related Words in Connected Discourse.

Rosenberg, Sheldon

A group of 19 subjects was exposed to a verbal passage for learning that contained associatively related words, while a second group of 19 subjects was exposed to the identical passage but with high association (HA) words replaced by low association (LA) words. A written prompted recall test followed presentation. Group HA had as prompts all of the HA words, while Group LA had all of the LA words. The study was concerned with whether the observed superiority in the recall of content context words (CCWs) from HA passages is a storage or a retrieval phenomenon. Since it has been observed that HA words are recalled better than LA words, it was necessary in the present study to equate the groups on the number of prompt words available during recall. Significantly more CCWs and significantly more prompt words appeared on the recall sheets of the HA subjects. However, there was some evidence that for some clusters of prompt words, proportionally more CCWs were recalled by HA subjects than by LA subjects. (Author/DO)